Pub games

For the part of the evening after the quiz, when nobody wants to think any more.

The rules for what goes here are the rules of the room. It has to work on one phone passed round a table. It has to be understood without being explained, by somebody who has had two pints and is not concentrating. And it has to be over before the next round arrives, because a game that outlasts a round is a game nobody finishes.

That rules out almost everything and leaves the classics, which is the point. These games are old because they work.

First up: Hi-Lo

The card game every pub in the country has played for a drink. A card is face up. Higher or lower. Get it wrong and you are done.

It survives because the maths is doing something your gut disagrees with, all evening, and your gut never learns. Ours keeps score, tells you what the odds actually were on the card you just got wrong, and is free.

After that

Short, classic, and playable one-handed. Nothing that needs an account, an app, or a tutorial. If a game needs a tutorial it has already lost the table.

Not yet

This is a holding page and says so. The games are being built to a standard rather than to a deadline, and the standard is a console quiz game from 2007 that got the living-room version of this exactly right: fast rounds, a scoreboard everybody can read from across the room, and no explaining.

Meanwhile the pub quizzes are the other half of the same evening, and every milestone birthday book has a table-games section in the back of it already.